


Midge Glass and the Secret Admirer

by seekingferret



Category: Henry Reed - Keith Robertson
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 14:12:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4708889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another fun adventure for Henry and Midge</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midge Glass and the Secret Admirer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).



Dear Diary,

I just saw Henry off to the train station. He'll transfer at Penn Station to the Trenton line. It's ironic that Henry, whose attachment to Central Jersey always seemed so ephemeral, has now attained the glorious title of Princeton Man, while I have forsaken the land of my fathers for the glamorous life of Poughkeepsie. 

It was a good visit, by which I of course mean we were not caught doing anything that would get me suspended from Vassar. A week before the visit, I received a large wooden package in the post. Our dorm mother wanted me to open the package in her presence, but thankfully I was able to decoy her away from it by asking her about the boy who was courting Leslie. The package was a gift from Henry, quite ingenious: a sort of retracting metal ladder with hooks that snap onto a windowsill. It has a geared crank that I could use to pull it up and down from the top. 

Of course, Henry and I had no plans to do anything in my bedroom that our dorm mother would disapprove of, but having him stay in my room was simpler than making him have to get a hotel room halfway across town. We'd slept in the same room, or the same tent for that matter, so many times over the years that we were both bewildered when we remembered that it was against school rules for him to do so here. When Henry arrived, he made a big show of standing in the dorm lobby for a carefully witnessed meeting with me. Then he left "to go to his hotel", snuck around the back, and I rapunzeled him and his weekend bag into my room. 

We spent an hour or so catching up on the news since our last exchange of letters, then I lowered him down out the window so we could go to dinner and met him back in front of the dorm with a couple of my floormates, Rosalyn and Gina. Gina was immediately taken with Henry, who was immediately taken with Rosalyn, who was immediately taken with a hatred for Henry. It was quite funny, at least to me. None of them seemed to find it all that funny. Gina spent most of dinner glaring at Rosalyn. Rosalyn spent most of dinner glaring at Henry. I spent most of dinner trying not to crack up. Mostly I failed. Every time I managed to restrain my laughter, I would look over at Henry, who would raise his eyebrows helplessly at me on cue. I couldn't help it. It got me every time. 

Fortunately after dinner Gina had to go to chorus practice, and Rosalyn begged off to go wash her hair. Henry immediately started to press me for information about Rosalyn, which I happily supplied him. "Number one most important thing you have to know about Rosalyn," I said, "Is that she can't stand you." Then I cracked up again. 

"Does she like poetry?" he asked. "I could write a poem to woo her." She did like poetry, actually, but it wouldn't matter a whit if the poetry came from Henry. She'd throw it in the trash before reading it. Her hatred of Henry was instantaneous and irrational. But what if she didn't know it was Henry who wrote the poem? What if it were a secret admirer wooing her with romantic poetry? I spelled out my plan to Henry and he was completely in favor of it. "Just like in Cyrano de Bergerac!" he said. I agreed with him, though I had actually been thinking of a Milly the Model comic I'd just read. 

We had been planning to go over to get a beer together, but he wanted to get a head start on his love poem, so instead we went back to my dorm. I lowered the ladder and let him into my room and he proceeded to take over my desk, steal my chemistry notebook, and start to cover it with drafts of his poetry. I sat on my bed with my calculus textbook and studied Simpson's Rule. After a while, I got bored and just laid down on my bed. Pretty soon after that, Henry started reading me his terrible love poetry. It was just like old times. 

I made fun of his rhymes for a while until he got fed up and huffily declared his poem completed. Then it was time for the good part. Henry recopied the poem in a neat hand on a fresh page of paper and signed it "Your Secret Admirer". Then I helped him tie a rope around his waist for safety and anchored it to my bedpost, and he climbed out the window onto the ledge. Rosalyn's room was right next to mine, and I'd convinced Henry that the love note would be that much more mysterious if it were slipped in through the window rather than under her door. He returned a minute later, having deposited the note through the window one room left of mine. 

Unfortunately, Rosalyn's room was one room right of mine. I'm afraid this confusion may have been my fault. Sometimes I have a perverse side. In the morning, I was awakened by a knock on the door. I motioned Henry to hide and opened it to a cheerful Gina, waving a note.

"I have a secret admirer!" she said.

"So you do, Gina. So you do. Who do you think it is?" I said, fighting wildly to keep a straight face as I read the note she handed to me. I thought I heard a quiet groan from beneath my bed.

"I don't know, it's a secret. Maybe it's Bobby. He was visiting from Yale this weekend, and I always got the impression he kind of liked me. Do you think it could be him?"

"Could be," I allowed.

"Oh, this is so exciting! I have to go tell Rhonda!" She grabbed the note from my hands and ran off to knock on the next door. 

When I closed the door and Henry emerged from beneath my bed, he was quite furious with me. He wanted to write another poem and slip it into the correct room, but I convinced him that would only make things worse, since both Gina and Rosalyn would think that the Secret Admirer had intended both notes for her. 

"I must be fated to always fail in romance," Henry told me, and I agreed.

We got breakfast at Honey's Cafe, and then we walked over to the main quad to laze around in the hazy mid-autumn sunlight. We passed a pleasant morning brainstorming ways we would make better use of the quad's open space- quartering goats, holding three-legged race tournaments, erecting mazes. Around one o'clock, I borrowed a couple of bikes from Lisa and we biked along the Hudson River until dinner time.

On the ride back, we bumped into Robert Hamilton, who was visiting from Yale as Gina had said. He greeted us, but he looked pretty cross.

"Say, Maggie," he said, "Did you hear this nonsense about Gina having a secret admirer?" 

I hate people who call me Maggie. "So you mean it's not you? Gina seemed sure it was you."

"Me? Write mushy love poetry?" He looked stricken. "I wish I'd thought of the idea. I'd been planning to ask her to go to dinner with me tonight, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise with her. She kept babbling on and on about this secret admirer fellow. Apparently he's some poet." I glanced over at Henry's guilty face and begged my willpower to hold out against my desire to laugh. "The nerve of some people. I've been working on Gina for a month, trying to make an impression on her, and I think it was starting to work, and now she's all smitten with this chap who can't even bother to say his name."

"Why can't you have thought of the idea?" I said. "I mean, it's a secret admirer, right? If you tell her it was you who wrote the poem, how will she know the difference?"

"Are you telling him to lie, Midge?" Henry said, inserting himself most unwelcomely into the conversation.

"I'm not going to lie to dear Gina," Bobby said.

"You don't need to lie, exactly. Just tell her that the sentiments in the poem are yours. That would be true, right? All of the sentiments of tender love in that poem are things you feel about her, so it wouldn't be a lie, and if she inferred that it meant you wrote the poem, that's her fault, not yours."

He looked dubious.

"Come on, sport, it's worth a try. The worst that happens is she says no, and then you're as bad off as you are now when she's gone crazy over that dashing and mysterious poet." Sometimes you can't stand Henry, and then he comes through for you. He's a pretty good friend, for a boy. Bobby agreed to try our suggestion and ran off to Strong Hall to pay a call on Gina. Hopefully Gina will believe him, or I'll have to deal with her secret admirer nonsense for weeks after Henry is gone. Henry and I dropped Lisa's bikes off and went to Coppola's for dinner. The spaghetti was amazing. 

After dinner, I walked him to the train station to see him off. I miss him already.

I think I'll give Henry's ladder to Rosalyn. She's quite fast, so she'll appreciate it more than I would, as long as I never tell her who made it.


End file.
